4
Tow-Truck Eddie knelt there in a pool of his own blood, his naked torso streaked with sweat, his face burned dark with red rage, his hands pressed together in prayer. His knuckles were raw hamburger, chopped and lacerated, with flaps of skin hanging open. Blood ran in slow lines down his forearms and dripped from his abraded elbows.
Around him his living room demonstrated his fury. The couch was overturned, its wooden bones shattered, each pillow bitten open and ripped apart. One metal foot of the heavy recliner was buried inches deep into the drywall by the dining room door, still canted at the awkward angle into which it had settled after Eddie picked it up and hurled it half the length of the room. The coffee table was a mass of mahogany splinters scattered in a fan pattern around the shaft of the floor lamp Eddie had used to smash it.
“I’m sorry!” he said, and it was maybe the hundredth time he’d said it. It was all he had said since he’d come home late last night ashamed, furious, and defeated.
Hours earlier he’d had to call his boss, Shanahan, to tell him that he had driven the company’s best wrecker off the road into a ditch near Shandy’s Curve out o
n Route A-32.
Shanahan was furious. “Are you friggin’ kidding me here, Eddie?”
“No sir,” Eddie whispered back, his shame so huge that it was like a pounding surf smashing down on him.
There was a long pause on the line. “You hurt?” Shanahan asked, his concern grudging.
“Nothing to worry about. ” In fact his knee was badly bruised, the muscles in his neck were sore, and he had a slowly pounding headache that suggested whiplash. But he would never say it, couldn’t bear to hear sympathy. The under-tone of disapproval and disappointment was bad enough. “I need another truck to pull me out. ”
“How bad’s the wrecker?”
“Not too bad. I’ll fix what I can and you can dock the rest out of my pay. ”
“I’m insured. But—damn it, Eddie, how’d the hell you put the thing into a ditch?” Before Eddie could invent an excuse, Shanahan said, “Give me half an hour and I’ll come fetch you. ”
Eddie sat on the side of the ditch waiting, murderous with humiliation as Shanahan pulled the wrecker out. But that was not the real source of Eddie’s shame—it was the sure knowledge that he had betrayed the trust his Father had shown him. For weeks now Eddie had been hearing the voice of God whispering to him in his head, telling him wonderful things, revealing to him that Eddie was the Messiah come again and, even more wonderfully, that Eddie was the Sword of God! It confirmed what Eddie had always suspected, but hearing the Voice of God speaking to him…to him…was beyond glorious.
God told him that the New Age was coming, that a New Covenant was about to be made between mankind and the Divine All, but that the Beast—the Antichrist in human disguise—had manifested on Earth to try and thwart God’s holy plan. Eddie’s mission had been to seek out this monster and strike him down to the furtherance of His glory. But the mission was far more difficult than Eddie had thought because the Beast wore a costume of flesh and bone that looked like a boy, and he rode around town on an ordinary bicycle. Such a clever disguise, but Tow-Truck Eddie had ultimately seen through it and had hunted the roads for him for two weeks. Last night he had received a whisper from God Himself, telling him to wait for the Beast out there on the road. He’d known the time, the place, the moment. It should all have gone smoothly; but nothing had gone right and Eddie, through his mortal weakness, had let the Beast defeat him with ridiculous ease, tricking him into that ditch.
Since then Eddie had begged, wept, and cried aloud to his Father, trying to explain, to seek forgiveness of his great sin…but God’s voice had been silent since the accident. Not one word, not even a reproof. Nothing. Just an aching silence so profound that Eddie could feel his heart break bit by bit. All through the long, long night he had alternately prayed and pleaded, and then as dawn broke over his house and the interior shadows shifted from black to a muddy gray, Eddie’s heartache and shame had boiled up from his gut to his brain and he had gone berserk, screaming, raging up and down the stairs, smashing everything that would break, punching holes through plaster, crushing, all the time crying out to his Father for some answer.
When the volcano of fury burned down, the hours of sleeplessness, the aches in his body, and the weight of his grief collapsed him down to his knees amid the debris. He had nothing left, he was nothing. Tears streaked his face, drool hung from his rubbery lips. In his ears he could hear the pounding of his heart—it sounded like someone hitting a bass drum with a fist wrapped in gauze.
“I’m sorry,” he blubbered, hanging his head. “I’m so sorry. ”
The Bone Man lingered in the shadows of the destroyed living room. He’d enjoyed Eddie’s frustrated rage. Such a damn shame it stopped short of the big man just plain killing himself. He pretended to sigh.
“That’s one round to us,” he said, though his voice was as soundless as he was invisible.
Even so, Tow-Truck Eddie’s head jerked up as if he had heard those words. The Bone Man froze, afraid to even move as Eddie looked around in confusion, pawing tears from his eyes, brow knitted. It was a long minute before Eddie’s scowl faltered and his eyes lost their hawklike intensity. He bent again to his prayers and his pleas, and the Bone Man backed carefully out through the wall.
5
Crow slipped away when Sarah’s sister Rose arrived from Brooklyn. He drifted to the nurse’s station and begged for information, but instead of a doctor Jim Polk came smirking out of the ER.
Polk said, “You’re going to have to stop harassing the nurses, pal. ”
Startled, Crow said, “What the hell are you talking about? Val’s my—”
“Val’s a material witness is a murder case. Once the doctors are done with her we have to take her statement. Until we do no one gets to see her. ”
Polk wasn’t a big man, but he was taller and heavier than Crow, and he wore a hyena smile as he spoke, slowly chewing a wad of pink gum. His teeth were wet and his eyes looked piggish. Crow wanted to stuff him into a laundry chute.
“Look, Jim,” he began, trying to be reasonable, “it’s not like I don’t know the drill here. How about a little professional courtesy?”
“You’re not a cop anymore. ”
“Actually, I think I am. Terry swore me back onto the department during the Ruger manhunt. He never swore me out again, so technically—”